From Aeon: “Historians mostly agree that tipping was originally an aristocratic custom. In early 17th century England, it became expected that visitors to a private home would, on departure, leave a small amount of money, called a vail, to the servants. The practice spread to coffee houses, then to other service providers and eventually abroad.
The word ‘tip’ itself is of unclear origin. The most likely source is the Latin stips, meaning a gift. Since the Oxford English Dictionary cites the first usage of the word in 1706, it is almost certainly a myth that it stands for ‘To Insure Prompt Service’, a sign Samuel Johnson reported seeing on a tipping jar in an 18th century coffee house. Tips have rarely insured any such thing. Like parting vails, most are given too late to make a difference, which has made the custom baffling to economists, who cannot understand why people would pay more for a service than they need to.
Tipping for better service not only defies the arrow of time, it also flies in the face of observation. Studies have shown that there is only a weak relationship between customers’ satisfaction with service and the size of their tips. There are other, more reliable ways of increasing tips than doing a good job, such as ‘upselling’: persuading the customer to order more, or more expensive, food and drink. A larger bill almost always means a larger tip, since most people simply give a percentage.
Anthropologists as well as economists are left scratching their heads by tipping. For several decades, they embraced the distinction, made in the early to mid-20th century by Polish anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski and French sociologist Marcel Mauss, between gift and commodity (or exchange) economies. In exchange economies, such as today’s industrialised nations, goods and services are simply bought, usually by money but sometimes by a form of barter. In these cultures, a gift is not a gift if something is expected in return. However, there are implicit rules and customs that ensure that over time, givers become receivers and the system works to the mutual benefit of all.
‘If you stay until two in the morning nursing a digestif, some poor bugger has to wait for you for no extra money. A tip in this circumstance is good manners’
Any restaurant worth its sea salt knows that both parts of the term ‘hospitality industry’ matter. Yes, diners pay, but staff have to make sure they feel like guests, not just purchasers. That’s certainly the way the head chef at Noma in Copenhagen, four times winner of the best restaurant in the world accolade, sees it. ‘Most people in restaurants give everything that they can for the guest,’ says René Redzepi. ‘Tipping is an appreciation of that.’
Shaun Hill, chef-patron at the Michelin-starred Walnut Tree in Abergavenny in Wales, offers a good example of when this is especially true. ‘If you stay until two in the morning nursing a digestif and chatting to your newest best friend, then some poor bugger has to sit waiting for you to piss off home for no extra money. A tip in this circumstance is good manners, unless of course you are content to be told to go home once coffee is finished.’